The Great Recession and "What Really Matters in Life"

The level of the mainstream discourse on world affairs is, of course, very low--with most of what gets to be heard exceedingly stupid, to the point of being what, in John Kenneth Galbraith's memorable phrasing, "would, by the uncouth, be called drivel."

So did it go with the 2007 financial crisis.

Much of said stupidity was as pernicious as it was false--as with the deflection of blame from bankers, speculators, regulators, politicians and the economics "experts" who lent cover to all of the above by the exceedingly shabby means of scapegoating the general public, and above all hapless mortgage takers for having let mortgage-backed securities mad functionaries foist on them loans they had little chance of repaying; providing cover for a bailout of Wall Street at the expense of a Main Street left to cope on its own in another exercise in "socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor"; and passing off the crisis as something quickly gotten over, as if circa 2012 the world had already got back on its onward and upward way.

The particular stupidity about the crisis and its hardships teaching people "what really matters in life" was of a piece with this-- perpetuating the false narrative that "we" were all responsible in such a manner, all of us mad with greed and since chastened and, with the crisis receding behind us, having learned our lesson, could be expected to act more "responsibly," when what really happened, was that the crisis of twenty to thirty banks in the trans-Atlantic financial system translated into a crisis that wrecked the world, all as business as usual continued, even as the global economy frayed and increasingly threatened to pull apart.

Ideally those who spoke such stupidities would today be ashamed of ever having done so--but I suspect few recall that they ever did, while pointing the fact out would, like the use of the word "drivel" to characterize it, be considered uncouth by the makers of respectable opinion, so that it is never done by anyone with a platform from which the speaker can actually be heard.